The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior (review)

Reviewed by: The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior Harrison Otis The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. By Karen Swallow Prior. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2023. ISBN 9781587435751. Pp. 289. 26. 99. The subtitle of Karen Swallow Prior's recent monograph, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, reveals its sense of occasion: a crisis in American evangelical culture. Marked by "increasing division, decreasing church membership and attendance, mounting revelations of abuse and cover-up of abuse, and an ongoing reckoning with our racist past and present" (3), American evangelicalism, Prior claims, is ripe for a new reformation. To this end, her monograph seeks to alert evangelicals to what aspects of their culture may need reforming, and why. Prior characterizes her argument as a kind of apocalypse, in the word's etymological sense of "unveiling" (3), and in this sense The Evangelical Imagination might be helpfully compared with James K. A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom (2009), which likewise begins with an "apocalyptic" description of a cultural institution (in Smith's case, a shopping mall). Just as Smith seeks to unveil the extent to which his audience is shaped by much more than the propositional content of its beliefs, so Prior seeks to unveil the extent to which her evangelical audience may be shaped by much more than simply Scripture—the extent to which American evangelical culture may be a product more of the Enlightenment or the Victorian era than of Christ's teaching. In this way, Prior's book might also be considered a more wide-ranging and less polemical counterpart to Beth Allison Barr's The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2021). Neither author is by training a theologian, but both write to a popular audience about how their own academic expertise (for Barr, history; for Prior, English) sheds a sometimes unflattering light on received evangelical beliefs. (Prior, who researched the book while teaching at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary—though she resigned her position there in spring 2023—writes from a more theologically conservative standpoint than Barr. ) If evangelicalism is a house, Prior explains, her argument attempts to peel back the wallpaper and examine the strength of the joists and studs: "Some of these parts are solid. Some are rotten. Some can be salvaged. Some ought not to be saved" (3). Nevertheless, it is Prior's contention that the first step in renovating the house is inspecting what's already there. End Page 153 In her first chapter, Prior establishes the terms of her argument by discussing the two key terms from her title: "evangelical" and "imagination. " Aligning herself with the work of Smith and Charles Taylor, Prior explains the concept of the social imaginary, arguing that cultures are constituted by their metaphors, their habitual ways of seeing and imagining and speaking about the world. Prior emphasizes the givenness of the social imaginary, the fact that each of us is always already shaped by the "languages, practices, values, beliefs, associations, metaphors, and stories" of the tradition that forms us (22). Because of this, she writes, "gaining our bearings requires us to first recognize that we have been oriented" (31). And evangelicals have been oriented by much more than the culture wars of recent decades: taking a long historical view, Prior traces the origins of the modern evangelical movement to eighteenth-century England. "Evangelical, " of course, is notoriously difficult to define, and Prior offers a smorgasbord of complementary characterizations—from David Bebbington, the National Association of Evangelicals, Timothy Larsen, John Stackhouse, and Molly Worthen—rather than attempting her own original definition. Despite the term's inherent ambiguity, Prior argues that there is an identifiable "evangelical imagination, " a central body of shared metaphors, assumptions, and stories that have shaped the evangelical movement's three-hundred-year development. The remaining ten chapters each discuss an independent component of the evangelical social imaginary: awakening, conversion, testimony, improvement, sentimentality, materiality, domesticity, empire, reformation, and rapture. In each chapter, Prior generally discusses the historical context that has shaped the way evangelicals understand each of these topics (with a special focus. . .